Frank DiGenero owes his life to inveterate adventurer Kirby Harris. Shot down over a Laotian rice paddy in 1972, DiGenero was in desperate peril when Kirby swooped down in a light aircraft and rescued him under the muzzles of the NVA. Now, a decade later, DiGenero is a top FBI executive, and one of his investigations turns up Harris as a suspect in the illegal trapping and sale of birds of prey. DiGenero's first concern is to untangle Harris from the endangered-species investigations; whatever the cost to career, that much is owed. But it shortly transpires that Operation Raptor has run into a Middle Eastern assassination plot involving the use of a falcon to deliver a radio-activated bomb to the King of Saudi Arabia. How DiGenero foils this plot makes for entertaining reading in this first novel by a veteran of the State Department, the CIA and other government agencies and business occupations. Harrington evokes a variety of settings around the worldfrom Utah and Montana, to Washington, D.C., Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, West Germany, Iran and three provinces of Canada. His plot is plausible, the technical material never obtrusive, and he sustains tension with finesse. (September)